Nothing beats the giddy flutter of excitement before facing an audience – I’m lucky to be back gigging

Reliable jokes are like custard, writes Jenny Eclair – ideal for covering up the dry and tasteless bits after a year off-stage

The return to live stand-up has been been scary and exhilarating (iStock/Getty)

It’s been a long time, and I’m rustier than an old tractor left to rot in a shed, but I have gigged again, and it was both terrible and delicious in equal measures.

Terrible because I decided, in typical masochistic fashion, that I must only perform new material. As most comics know, the hit rate of new material is perniciously low – and yet also delicious. Just as swimmers need to swim, stand-ups need to be in front of a live audience.

As I said as I walked onstage: “Zoom is great for stuff like Christmas with the family, but not for gigs.” I like to see my audience and I like to smell ’em. My crowd, incidentally, tend to be top notes of Sauvignon Blanc crossed with Deep Heat.

Up and down the country, hundreds of us are dusting off our microphones and taking to socially distanced “try-out nights”. That’s because, come the Autumn, fingers crossed, we’ll be back on the road touring shows that need several months of incubating and honing in small venues before we have the gall to charge a full ticket price.

Timing isn’t just about delivering gags properly; it’s also about making sure that you have written enough new material, and road-tested it sufficiently, before attempting to play a bigger space. For every comic who insists they “make it up as they go along”, there many more of us sweating for hours over the exact word-order of a single line.

Pre-Covid, new material would be presented in bite-sized morsels throughout the year. Almost by stealth, you’d build a new set by slipping in a fresh line here, an experimental chunk there – and if anything bombed you could smother it with a nice healthy dollop of “tried and tested”. Reliable jokes are like very good custard: ideal for covering the dried-up, burnt, and tasteless bits.

With no gigs for 14 months, and a tour scheduled to start in September, I don’t have time to smuggle new material in. I’ve got to subject myself – and the audience – to an evening of brand-spanking-new stuff that has been sitting on my computer screen for the past six months and must now start to earn its keep. This experience is both exhilarating and appalling. Obviously the audience knows what it’s in for – these gigs are always advertised as “work in progress”, which in my case involves notebooks, cue cards, and a printed copy of the script onstage with me.

This was my first hurdle, printing off the script. During lockdown I got a new printer because I’d stamped on the old printer’s head. The new printer has a default setting meaning it automatically prints on both sides of the paper. This is a great idea: it saves paper, especially if, like me, you can only read in a size twenty font. However, having a double-sided script causes chaos onstage. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the button to alter this setting before leaving for the venue, hence my first “back to work” cry.

I was nervous, including about driving myself across London. My old car finally died during the pandemic and I’d never driven the new one in the dark before. I was anxious about finding the venue and somewhere to park. I was worried about everything, even my tea. Lockdown has made me soft; it’s been more than a year of supper in my nightie in front of the telly and doing nothing more taxing than a Gustav Klimt jigsaw with lots of gold bits.

I made myself a peanut butter sandwich and set the satnav on my phone, knowing that once I’d crossed the congestion charge line there’d be no turning back.

So what have I learnt about returning to the night shift, post lockdown? Well, for starters, I am instantly very happy in a dressing room. There is something incredibly comforting about a small private space before a show. Somewhere to breathe and play with your make-up toys. It doesn’t matter how unglamorous it is: the dressing room is part of the gig.

I learned that I have missed the feel of the microphone hooked around my ear, and the pack attached to my bra strap, and that nothing beats that feeling of utter alertness, the giddy flutter of excitement, that comes from standing in the wings before a performance. Soon it’s going to happen, and you have no idea how it might go.

This is the pre-show ritual: make-up, mic, giddiness, a quick tug on the left ear for luck, and on.

I also learned that a 61-year-old brain can’t learn an hour of material in a week, no matter how many times she writes it out on cue cards in different-coloured felt-tipped pens and records it into her phone.

The process of putting a show together is a long-winded, messy, and occasionally embarrassing process, but even if it means watching The Great British Sewing Bee on catch-up, I’m so lucky to be back where I belong.